The Spanish poet and philosopher Judah Ha'levi died in
Egypt in 1141 during an attempt to emigrate to the Holy Land. Second to the
caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the great Genizah in Cairo is the most
significant and evocative source for any fragments of early Hebrew MSS. The
Genizah was fully unearthed from 1896. Probably no Egyptian finds, except that
of Tutankhamon in 1922, has ever excited the public imagination so much at the
time of the discovery. No single source has added so much to our knowledge of
early Jewish culture.